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Some cities in the US have tried to. Luckily, there are wrinkly folks in the media to let them know why their city can't ban plastic trash:

(1) The plastic ban was written by out-of-towners trying to impose their will on us.
(2) We can't have city ordinances that make any kind of reference to a state law. (It's not really explained what the legal or logical basis for this is.)
(3) Weighing in at a massive 10 pages, the law is so lengthy and complex that you'd need to "hire a full-time attorney" to comprehend it.
(4) The city will need to hire full-time straw inspectors.
(5) It's too much of a burden for stores to stock paper bags instead of plastic.
(6) People who receive food stamps will still be allowed to use plastic bags - an "entire class of citizens" would be free from having to comply!

In his closing paragraph, he makes sure to tell us he "expects the City Council to pick up the trash".

This does appear to be a legitimate news site, and not The Onion.

Portmout, NH sa one Uber driver. The taxi business in a town of 20,000 is very different that in a city of 20,000,000.

The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.

The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?"

Why is the illegality argument contrived? Yes some municipalities have changed their laws to allow it, that doesn't change the fact that they're basing their expansion around a practise of flagrantly violating the law everywhere else.

I've been following with interest the debate about government-regulated taxis versus free-market Uber.

So far as I can tell, the argument for Uber is that it's cheaper, and the rides are nicer and more convenient, but otherwise it's the same service. In particular, the service has not been a statistically significant source of crime.

The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.

The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?")

And as to the insurance argument, the Boston Globe reports that "Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms".

Uber is a good service, people seem to like and want it.

Are there any objections I've missed? Besides "predictions", of course(*). Anyone can predict anything and sound just like an economist.

(*) Predictions are invalid because both solutions are in play right now. There's no need to predict what will happen because we can just look to see if it's happening.

because I have seen exactly *ZERO* reviews out there.

blind or stupid? it might help to look...pwned!

Not quite.

Maine is known, among other things, for the blueberry crop. This used to be picked mostly by Micmac Indians from Maine and Canada, and high-schoolers (like me) and other locals that would do what is by any measure back-breaking work for pretty good pay. I made $600 a week for a month in 1970-1972. Not bad for a student. The majority of the crop was picked that way through the 80's.

Today, maybe a fifth is picked by hand, and most of that by Hispanic migrants. The Micamcs mostly pick on an Indian reservation farm.

The reality is that the major producers prefer migrant workers from away for several reasons. The one I hear the most is 'lower pay'. Just the way it is.

I hear a complaint sometimes that migrants, illegals, etc. take jobs Americans won't do. Mostly, I suspect this is because we 'Americans' don't want to do some jobs for the pay some employers want to pay. Not the same thing as 'not wanting' a job. How did toilets get cleaned before we had a serious illegal immigrant problem?

But the H1-B problem is a particularly nasty slap in the face. There are so many stories of qualified citizens not able to find work in fields where H1-B workers were being recruited that I'm not going to list any. Not hard to find.

I work for a company that uses both H1-B and other immigrants liberally for many sorts of IT work. Many of us are at a loss to explain how they can claim there are no US citizens available for the wor, the skill set is not unique, and neither is the workload.

One clever way around that they use is to contract with an offshore firm. No justification needed. the biggest number of these offshore workers are part of, you guessed it - IBM.

We'll be dealing with this soon enough, won't we?

Sadly, from the article, it looks as though this will not set a precedent that will discourage the RIAA from doing this sort of thing

This is a truly insightful comment:

The patents HAVE been granted and the courts are obligated to protect them. It's like making up rules for a game and then in the middle deciding which rules are and are not going to be enforced.

This is exactly the same as the Supreme Court deciding in favor of the City of New London, Connecticut in Kelo v. City of New London which has raised considerable furor and activism in one Justice's home town. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion: "The court should not 'second-guess' local governments ..." and neither ought it to "second-guess" the federal government in this case.

We have a Constitutional right to petition our government for redress in this area of patent. We are grumbling about this presently but I don't see any marches on Washington by geeks like us who want to demand changes to the law.

I also don't see an amicus brief on our behalf, either.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12262005/world/ 79889.htm

  No incentive for AIDS vaccine, researcher says

WASHINGTON (AP) - In an unusually candid admission, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one. And that means the government has had to spend more time focusing on the processes that drug companies ordinarily follow in developing new medicines and bringing them to market.

"We had to spend some time and energy paying attention to those aspects of development because the private side isn't picking it up," Dr. Edmund Tramont testified in a deposition in a recent employment lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press.

Tramont is head of the AIDS research division of the National Institutes of Health, and he predicted in his testimony that the government will eventually create a vaccine. He testified in July in the whistleblower case of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein.

"If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we're going to have an HIV vaccine. It's not going to be made by a company," Tramont said. "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it."

"They will eventually - if it works, they won't have to make that big investment. And they can make it and sell it and make a profit," he said.

An official of the group representing the country's major drug companies took sharp exception to Tramont's comments. "That is simply not true. America's pharmaceutical research companies are firmly committed to HIV/AIDS vaccine research and development with 15 potential vaccines in development today," said Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Good point about the theory not being falsifiable.

I'd probably hesitate to claim "it's not a theory". Instead, I prefer to judge theories on how well it can be tested, what evidence supports it, and so on. There's a fair number of researchers looking into what might have happened before the big bang. It's likely these ideas aren't ever going to be testable, but they're thought provoking and I'd tend to call them theories.

Sometimes the line between a wacky idea and an accepted scientific theory is a thin one. Just ask the guy who won the Nobel prize for his research on ulcers, drinking a mixture of bacteria to prove a point.

• Obscene conduct can include indecent exposure and urinating in public if police convict a person of the charges three separate times, said MSU police Detective Earl Barringer.
• Jones also said that not every person on the sex offender list has necessarily committed an egregious crime such as rape or molestation because a conviction of indecent exposure, even in cases such as public urination, can land someone on the list.
• Michigan's sex-offender registry currently includes teenagers prosecuted for having consensual sex with underage girlfriends and a woman convicted of urinating in public.
• Violations ranging from groping or fondling to more minor offenses, like public indecency -- which includes urinating in a public park -- are posted on the sex offender registry for 10 years. More serious offenses, such as aggravated criminal sexual assault, are posted for life.

Things that can get you on a registered sexual offender list:

public urination, exhibitionism, nudism, streaking, flashing, mooning, outdoor consensual sex, lewd behaviour.

Dont believe me?

utah law book says:

(d) "Sex offender" means any person convicted by this state or who enters a plea in abeyance for violating Section 76-7-102, 76-9-702.5, 76-5a-3, 76-10-1306, or 76-5-301.1

and all of those are for lewd behaviour that specifically includes public urination, streaking, and mooning.

LAW LINK

"The study found that people charged with crimes such as public urination, flashing, consensual sex between teenagers, possession of child pornography and adult prostitution are all classified as sex offenders in some states."

Link to source

"Plaistow Deputy Chief Kathleen Jones also said that not every person on the sex offender list has necessarily committed an egregious crime such as rape or molestation because a conviction of indecent exposure, even in cases such as public urination, can land someone on the list."
Link

"According to Michigan State Police Sgt. Troy Fellows, urinating in public is classified as indecent exposure, and requires sex offender registration after three convictions...[And] Judges [can] to order registration after any number of convictions..."

Link

Country: Kerry, Bush, neither

Kerry
Germany: 74%, 10%, 16%
Norway: 74%, 7%, 19%
France: 64%, 5%, 31%
Canada: 61%, 16%, 23%
Italy: 58%, 14%, 28%
Brazil: 57%, 14%, 29%
Indonesia: 57%, 34%, 9%
China: 52%, 12%, 36%

Kerry, no mandate
UK: 47%, 16%, 37%
Japan: 43%, 32%, 25%

Too close to call, no mandate
India: 34%, 33%, 33%

Bush
Philippines: 32%, 57%, 11%

Neither, no mandate
Spain: 45%, 7%, 48%
Mexico: 38%, 18%, 44%
Nigeria: 33%, 27%, 40%
Thailand: 30%, 33%, 37%
Poland: 26%, 31%, 43%

2000: Gore, Bush, other, none of the candidates

None of the candidates
USA: 22.0%**, 21.8%**, 1.7%, 54.5%*

* Eligible voters
** Gore, Bush, and other's percentage support of eligible (I hope)

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They usually look something like this.

Its a sea change from the 80s when IBM was kicked out of India during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's administration.

To really look beyond the short-term glitter and understand what this might lead up to, you must watch Life & Debt, which chronicles the Jamaican tragedy. Once Jamaica agreed to freetrade & opened up its trade zones, in a short span of few months, its entire native diary industry & banana trade was totally destroyed ( Milkpowder was dumped at dirt-cheap prices, and MNCs like Dole undercut the banana trade by bringing in bananas from Mexico ). There are a lot of pluses to free trade, but unless developing nations like India wield their bargaining power carefully, they will sell out to corporations & lose their autonomy.

But a lot of Indians in the panel felt the American ownership of Indian firms was a good thing, and it could erase some of the anti-outsourcing sentiment prevailing here in the US. Towards the end, the panel discussion got particularly heated up with sharply polarized arguments from both sides. A host of people agreed to talk to us about the "sale of India", as one of them put it.No easy answers to be found on this one.

there is an other way...

"The "telephone tooth" would place a small device in a person's back molar that includes a wireless, low-frequency receiver and a gadget that turns audio signals into mechanical vibrations, which would pass from the tooth directly to the inner ear as clear sounds. "

Whoa there. Not quite. How the federal money spent on Big Dig was used was and probably still is being investigated and the state is suing the engineering firms involved. On a more direct note for those that realize that such a large amount of money doesn't just disappear, some outrightly state that it simply went to organized crime. While the States Attorney General's office offers a hotline to call in about it. The extra cash was NOT spent on some technological endeavor or some "save the whales" environmental concern, although that may have been added. The cash, most likely, went into some gangster's pocket. Plain and simple.

Hate to break it to you, bub, but according to this article from 2000, 70% of the money came from federal funds. Since the total cost has gone up by another couple billion since then, the percentage has probably come down a bit.

Still, the Big Dig is mostly being paid for by people who may never set foot in Massachusetts, much less drive in one of those tunnels.

That includes me, though I had the distinct displeasure of sitting in a 3-hour afternoon rush hour traffic jam on the Central Artery back in 1995, when I went up to Boston for MacWorld. Not fun. It was August, it was about 95F out, and I had to turn the heat on in my 1-year old car to keep the engine from overheating.

...providing civilians with an inside perspective and a virtual role in today's premiere land force, the U.S. Army.

Oh? So the game provides you with thousands of innocent civilians to kill? Or does it offer you leisure time to get some feedback from the locals?

I hope not. I hate it when fun little fantasies get complicated by reality. Hopefully all the bad guys look like Osama or Saddam.

For those who don't know...

Sorry guys, if you were expecting him to be different from the majority of other politicians then you will be truly disappointed. He might be better than Bush or Lieberman, but not much. If UCE will get him into the Oval Office then UCE it is.

From the Portsmouth [New Hampshire] Herald, August 10, 2003:

"A medical marijuana campaign report card"
Howard Dean - Rating: F+
In short: Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is a physician, is the only candidate who has actually killed a medical marijuana bill. Because of Dean's actions, Vermonters with AIDS, cancer and other terrible illnesses still face arrest and jail under state law for using medical marijuana. Dean recently retreated from his earlier pledge to direct the FDA to study medical marijuana. His reversal and his actions have shown that medical marijuana patients can never trust him. The only reason we give Dean an F+ and not a straight F is because the latter grade should be reserved for Bush, who is as cruel and heartless as anyone could possibly be on the medical marijuana issue.

Rutland Herald - Newspapers sue Dean for access to schedule
Portsmouth Herald - A medical marijuana campaig report card

My advice: pick another horse.